CBC Music Launches

On February 13, CBC launched a new music site called … CBC Music! Clever name, eh?

Anyway, the promise of the site is to promote music and create a whole way for for listeners to interact with CBC. I’ll update this page with the website address once it goes live, however, I’ve had a chance to see what it looks like and I think you’ll enjoy what it will offer.

As part of the launch, CBC Hosts like myself have been asked to press Shuffle on our MP-3 players and share a few words about the first 10 songs played.

Here’s my list.

1. Burton Cummings – You Saved My Soul … This is one those K-Tel songs for me. I don’t remember hearing it on the radio but it was on a K-Tel record from 1981, Sound Explosion or something like that. It was a neat discovery amongst the well-known hits.

2. Eric Clapton – Behind the Mask … I first heard this during a Prince’s Trust Concert on the radio in 1986. It came from that LIVE AID era when Clapton, Phil Collins and Sting were all playing on each other’s records, and everyone else’s it seemed.

4. Al Stewart – Coldest Winter … How charmingly pointless is it for a folk-rocker to compose an opening line like “The coldest winter in memory was 1709.” Solid Gold!

5. Amy MacDonald – This Is The Life … Joyful tune from Scottish pop-rocker. This was on the radio constantly in London when I visited the city in 2007. It’s part of my soundtrack from that visit.

6. Peter Gabriel – Games WIthout Frontiers … This song has one of my favourite mondegreens, or mis-heard lyrics. I always thought he sang “She’s so popular.” Turns out the line is “Jeux sans frontieres.”

7. M+M (Martha & The Muffins) – Cooling the Medium … This song turned up on CBC‘s Video Hits quite a bit, back in tha day. Not a track that got overplayed, but just enough that it hangs around in the back of your mind and when you hear it again out of the blue, it’s like “Oh, wow! I remember this!”

8. Lennie Gallant – Pieces Of You … Remarkable song about Love lost. It’s like he heard Diggin’ Up Bones by Randy Travis and thought, “Well, I can do better than that.”

9. Supertramp – Cannonball … The first single from the band after long-time lead singer, Roger Hodgson, left two years before. Songwriter Rick Davies said he wrote the song because he wanted to see how long he could play ‘G’. The album version is 8 minutes long.

10. Robert Preston – I Won’t Send Roses … From the Broadway show, Mack & Mabel, lyricist Jerry Herman spent 8 months trying to compose a song where a man who could never say, “I love you,” says in his own way, “I love you.” A classic of American musical theatre.